New Director: Museum Should Invite, Incite Discussion in Community

Gary Morgan wants to expand the museum’s reach and increase the scope and nature of
the museum’s collections and exhibits.

The native Australian has spent his life surfing and scuba diving. He moved to Lubbock
in November to become executive director of the Museum of Texas Tech University, and there’s not a wave in sight.

Of course, he knew this when he got on the plane to come here – a 37-hour trip from
his hometown of Perth on the west coast of Australia – but he also likes hiking and
bird-watching, both activities he can do in West Texas.

More than his hobbies, though, he’s looking forward to working in a new environment
and culture as unique as those he experienced in his home country as well as the United
Arab Emirates, the Netherlands, parts of Africa and Michigan, exploring what the Museum
of Texas Tech can offer its community.

“It’s not seen to just belong to the university,” he said. “It’s owned by Lubbock,
and that’s the way we want it to be seen.”

Morgan, who also will oversee the Lubbock Lake Landmark, started his new job in early November. Though he is educated as a zoologist, spent
his early career in marine biology and loves research, he also discovered a passion
for presenting art, science and history in ways that interest and engage the viewer
and inspire people to act. He’s since found his home in museums.

He has grand plans for the museum, which is home to a diverse collection of regional
artwork, textiles, dinosaur bones and pottery as well as a diverse group of educators
and researchers who study paleontology, astronomy and education. Those plans include
finding different ways to showcase available resources and acquiring new, definitely
surprising, maybe a little disconcerting but ultimately mind-expanding exhibits to
the Hub City.

He sees the invitation to broaden one’s viewpoint through critical thinking as one
of the primary purposes of museums.

“All universities, and Texas Tech very much so, see their role as much more than just
vocational,” Morgan said. “It isn’t just about making these young people highly trained,
well-educated, very competitive people in the workforce, although that’s very important.
It’s to make them effective, ethical, functional citizens for a very complex world.”

The importance of informal, self-directed learning

While the museum hosts lectures and offers a museum science degree, most of the education
that happens there is less traditional. It comes less from reading the informational
plaques at each exhibit and more from interacting with art, history and ideas in a
museum.

“Formal education, as important as it is, is really only a small part of what defines
us,” Morgan said. “Those informal learning experiences really shape us, and they shape
us from a very young age.”

Morgan believes museums fill the gap between the layperson and a difficult topic.
World-class art can be intimidating. Paleontology, scientific and medical research
and human history can be hard to grasp. Frequently the explanations in books don’t
demystify these ideas.

A good museum will. Morgan listed two favorites in the museum world, which have dissimilar
collections but serve to bring greater understanding to visitors. The Musee d’Orsay
in Paris is a converted railway station filled with impressionist art – “just art
to die for.” It’s not a challenging experience, he said, but is a comforting space
in which to soak up the art of the ages. Even people who are unfamiliar with the artists
or uncomfortable with the abstract nature of some of the collection, it remains a
pleasant, inviting place to be, thus making the art a pleasant, inviting experience.

The other is Naturalis in Leiden, the Netherlands, a natural science museum that up
until a few years ago was not a public space at all but existed to house collections
and conduct research. Scientists from throughout the world traveled there to use their
facilities while the public walked past closed doors.

About a decade ago the museum opened to the public, with mammoth skeletons suspended
from the ceiling, filling the cavernous spaces. A colorful globe brings Earth to life
and exhibits based on the research that took place behind those doors for years fill
the space and invite viewers to come in, learn and think. It makes science not only
accessible but fun.

Morgan wants the Museum of Texas Tech to offer the same invitation.

“There’s a whole discipline in that translation,” he said. “If you look at how modern
museums are engaging with audiences, you just have to marvel at how museums have changed
in the last 50 years.”

Part of his desire is to know what will encourage people to come in and learn through
the exhibits the museum offers. He plans to research how people learn and what goes
into their interactions with the museum.

For instance, he wants to know how preschoolers interact with items in the museum.
What do they learn when looking at art, bugs or dinosaur bones? How does wandering
through a museum enhance a 4-year-old’s understanding of his or her world?

Evidence also exists that engaging with museum settings can enhance the cognitive
abilities of adults suffering from Alzheimer’s or early-onset dementia. Morgan has
already reached out to administrators at the Burkhart Center for Autism Education & Research in the hopes of studying how people with autism learn in a museum environment.

Asking the tough questions

Museums, especially university museums, should be a safe space for difficult ideas
and potentially uncomfortable conversations. He doesn’t necessarily want to change
people’s minds, Morgan said, but he wants them to think.

Sometimes that means debating current events, but it also may mean facing the dark
moments in history. The most controversial exhibit the museum has hosted thus far
is a traveling collection from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. It didn’t
inspire debate, but the images and stories that describe the Holocaust are disturbing.

“Can we deal with topics and issues not only that we haven’t dealt with before but
which are fundamentally extremely difficult to deal with because of the nature of
those topics?” Morgan asked. “I think that keeps us on our toes. It keeps us always
thinking beyond the square.”

He’s quick to add he never wants to offend museumgoers, but said he won’t shy away
from exhibits that discuss intellectually and socially challenging topics that present
different worldviews. That is the one critique he had of the museum thus far – its
exhibits tended to be safe and a little predictable. Museumgoers don’t leave surprised.
He wants to change that.

Morgan doesn’t have a specific exhibit ready to shake West Texans out of their comfort
zone, but as he mulled possibilities he tossed one such question: How would the community
react to an exhibit on Hispanic migration into the United States? It’s relevant, it’s
politically charged, it’s divisive. It would prompt viewers to examine their ideas
on the topic.

“If we’re not doing a bit of that, we’re not challenging people to think outside the
square,” he said. “There’s an expression about museums being safe places for dangerous
ideas. What it means is it is an environment where people can challenge themselves
and be challenged. The setting is not threatening, but the very themes themselves
may ask us as an audience to question why we hold the values that we do.”

Reaching students and other stakeholders

The museum isn’t just for the public, of course. Texas Tech is home to more than 30,000
students, many of whom have never entered the museum. He’d like to change that.

First, however, Morgan wants to know what students want in a museum. He’d like to
talk to students about the exhibits they find interesting, the ideas they’d like to
see presented and what they’d like to gain after an hour or two wandering the hallways
looking at art and historical pieces. The student body has to be a key stakeholder
group, he said.

What that collaboration looks like will take a little longer than a month on the job
to coordinate, but Morgan already has a couple of ideas. The museum has a student
association that includes its museum science and heritage management students, and
Morgan sees that as one way to find out what would attract students to the museum
and engage and excite students once they are inside.

“We really need help to do that, and the best help will come from people of their
same generation,” he said.

He’s also looking at other student organizations. Why not reach out to the Greek community?
Morgan pointed out the sororities and fraternities are already in a community; they’re
more connected with each other and with the campus at large. Perhaps he can get members
of the Greek or other established communities interested in the museum, who will then
pull other members in.

Other stakeholders include community leaders, education leaders both on and off campus
and the people in Lubbock and West Texas who already come to the museum and tell their
friends about it. He wants everyone who walks through the door to be an ambassador
for the museum.

At least one way Morgan plans to make that happen is tweaking the museum’s image.
He wants people to be surprised at what they find inside. He also wants visitors to
expect more than relics of ancient civilizations.

“What we are trying to do is assist in some way society in exploring its own future,”
he said. “Society is continually evolving. For museums to be relevant they need to
be at the edge of the discussion. They need to be where the dialogue is happening.
We’re not just about explaining where we came from, as interesting and important as
that is. But we are also engaged with exploring where we’re going, and the very nature
of exploring where we’re going has some intrinsic risks. I don’t want us to be so
timid that we’re not prepared to take a few risks.”

Expanding the museum’s reach

Texas Tech administrators anticipate the museum will grow in the next few years under
Morgan’s leadership, Senior Vice Provost Rob Stewart said. It may not get physically larger, but it is going places.

“Gary is enthusiastic about enhancing the museum’s national and international reputation
as well as strengthening interactions with the community and local entities,” Stewart
said. “He clearly understands Texas Tech’s aspirations to be a leading research university
and wants to partner across campus to highlight faculty and student research projects
for better public awareness. He also envisions the museum as a value-added asset for
the university in both faculty and student recruitment and retention.”

One idea is to take the museum to people. Morgan would like to create museum displays
throughout the university, perhaps highlighting a college’s research in the main foyer
of its building. Museum staff would create an engaging display that makes the academic
research, which can get technical and seem irrelevant to real life, understandable
and interesting.

“There are ways we can do those displays which can be very eye-catching, very attractive,
so we can get across information in user-friendly, aesthetic ways, and in the same
process enhance people’s understanding of really important but complex research,”
he said.

“We can be a great place for some of these really interesting multi- and cross-disciplinary
can be presented,” he said. “What I’ve found is those types of products, while some
can be quite challenging and puzzling to people, can also elicit conversation and
thought, and people have the opportunity to approach the topic, either through the
science or through the art, and that’s a very intriguing area.”

Given his background, Morgan also has museum and research contacts throughout the
world, and he’s not opposed to some international flair at Texas Tech. He’d like to
look at international collections and see about raising the museum’s status outside
of the region and even the nation.

“I believe we are going to see a much more vibrant and engaging museum under the leadership
of Dr. Morgan,” Stewart said.

It consists of the main Museum building, the Moody Planetarium, the Natural Science
Research Laboratory, the research and educational elements of the Lubbock Lake Landmark,
and the Val Verde County research site.

The museum also offers masters degrees in Museum Science and Heritage Management and
a wide variety of educational programs for the general public.